Twitter buys Ubalo to speed up its back-end

Twitter has acquired Ubalo, a company that provides coding and application development services, the social network announced Thursday.

Zach Miners
May 10, 2013

IDG News Service

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Twitter has acquired Ubalo, a company that provides coding and application development services, the social network announced Thursday.

"We've got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter," the site announced in a tweet. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ubalo describes its business as a way "to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience." It refers to its chief technology as "pods," which may contain code, data and any other files needed to support a developer's application.

The services of the privately-held company are geared toward more efficiently scaling code across multiple computers. When a user runs a pod, Ubalo, which its founders say means "counting," takes care of the details behind the scenes, according to the company's website. "We hide the details of the computers, environments, and messaging, so our users can worry much less about integration and scaling and instead write just the code they need for their analysis or processing," the company said.

Some of the company's previous work has included projects to reduce the image processing time for an application that uploaded files to Amazon's S3 web storage service, and retrieving and processing certain data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

It is not clear how exactly Twitter plans to incorporate Ubalo's technology into its back-end systems. The company declined to comment further on the deal beyond what Ubalo's staff said on its website, which noted that "we look forward to working with Twitter in the years to come."

The social network has in recent weeks announced new products aimed at making its site more interactive for users. In April the company announced an expansion to its Cards program, giving developers more options to embed content into tweets.

Last month the company also rolled out a stand-alone mobile music app, aimed at surfacing music that's trending across the social network.